Showing results by publisher "Quercus" in International Mystery & Crime

On the day after Christmas, head of Department Q Detective Carl Mørck finds himself handcuffed in a police car headed for Copenhagen's Vestre prison. After 15 years, a violent case from his past has caught up with him. Charges of drug trafficking and murder threaten to destroy his life and career. But he is being framed. Someone has a million dollar bounty on his head to make sure he doesn't talk, putting him in grave danger among the prison's incarcerated criminals and corrupt officers. The question that remains is, why?

Berlin, March 1943. The mood in Germany is bleak after their stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Private Investigator Bernie Gunther is at work in the German War Crimes Bureau - weary, cynical but well aware of the value of truth in a world where that's now a rarity. When human remains are found deep in the Katyn Forest, Bernie is sent to investigate. Rumour has it that this mass grave is full of Polish officers murdered by the Russians. For Josef Goebbels, proof of Russian involvement is sure to destroy the Western Alliance, giving Germany a chance to reverse its devastating losses.

A burned corpse is a disturbing mystery for Beijing detective Li Yan until he enlists forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell. Having abandoned a broken life in Chicago for her work, she's as determined as Li to ask difficult questions about the man's death. But some questions have answers they'd rather not hear - facts that others are desperate to conceal. The Firemaker is the first in the acclaimed China series from Peter May, author of Runaway, Entry Island and the internationally best-selling Lewis Trilogy.

The newspaper refers to the dead body only as Victim 2117 - the two thousand, one hundred and seventeenth refugee to die in the Mediterranean Sea. But to three people, the victim is so much more, and the death sets off a chain of events that throws Department Q, Copenhagen's cold cases division led by Detective Carl Mørck, into a deeply dangerous - and deeply personal - case: a case that not only reveals dark secrets about the past, but has deadly implications for the future.

Berlin 1934. The Nazis have been in power for just 18 months but already Germany has seen some frightening changes. As the city prepares to host the 1936 Olympics, Jews are being expelled from all German sporting organisations - a blatant example of discrimination. Forced to resign as a homicide detective with Berlin's Criminal Police, Bernie is now house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. Two bodies are found - one a businessman and the other a Jewish boxer.

It's June 2008 and 21-year-old Adam Lattimer vanishes, presumed dead. The strain of his disappearance breaks his already fragile family. Ten years later, with his mother deceased and siblings scattered across the globe, Adam turns up unannounced at the family home. His siblings return reluctantly to Spanish Cove, but Adam's reappearance poses more questions than answers. The past is a tangled web of deceit. And, as tension builds, it's apparent somebody has planned murderous revenge for the events of 10 years ago.

When Detective Sime Mackenzie boards a light aircraft at Montreal's St. Hubert airfield, he does so without looking back. For Sime, the 850-mile journey ahead represents an opportunity to escape the bitter blend of loneliness and regret that has come to characterise his life in the city. Travelling as part of an eight-officer investigation team, Sime's destination lies in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Only two kilometres wide and three long, Entry Island is home to a population of around 130 inhabitants - the wealthiest of which has just been discovered murdered in his home.

In a Copenhagen park the body of an elderly woman is discovered. Though the case bears a striking resemblance to another unsolved homicide from over a decade ago, the police cannot find any connection between the two victims. Across town a group of young women are being hunted down. The attacks seem random, but could these brutal acts of violence be related? Detective Carl Mørck of Department Q is charged with solving the mystery.

Eighteen mutilated women in a Shanghai mass grave. But this is only the beginning of a horrific case for Investigator Li Yan and Mei Ling, head of Shanghai's serious crime squad. Ling is a formidable woman, and she appears to threaten Li Yan's relationship with pathologist Margaret Campbell. But when Campbell discovers that the victims were subjected to live autopsies, she knows she'll need all the help she can get.

Munich, 1949, is home to all the backstabbing intrigue that prospers in the aftermath of war. A place where a private eye can find a lot of not-quite-reputable work: cleaning up the Nazi past of well-to-do locals, abetting fugitives in the flight abroad, sorting out rival claims to stolen goods. It's work that fills Bernie with disgust - but it also fills his sorely depleted wallet. Then a woman seeks him out. Her husband has disappeared. She's not looking to get him back - he's a wanted man who ran one of the most vicious concentration camps in Poland.

Someone is trying to destroy the evidence of history's greatest crimes. Academics and Holocaust survivors dead in mysterious circumstances. Museums and libraries burning. Digital records and irreplaceable proofs lost forever. Former White House operative Maggie Costello has sworn off politics. But when the Governor of Virginia seeks her help to stop the lethal spiral of killings, she knows that this is bigger than any political game. As Black Lives Matter protesters clash with slavery deniers, America is on a knife edge, and time is running out.

A missing art student. An international investigation. A secret that will shatter Bruno's charming village of St Denis. A rich American art student is found dead at the bottom of a well in an ancient hilltop castle. The young woman, Claudia, had been working in the archives of an eminent French art historian, a crippled Resistance war hero, at his art-filled chateau.

America, 1960. In Washington, DC, John F. Kennedy has just been elected president. In Havana, Fidel Castro has been in office for a year, and with Cold War tensions rapidly heating up and the Soviets leading the space race, the thought of a Communist leader so close to home is already raising American blood pressure. Anti-communist fever is rampant in the USA, with a paranoid establishment seeing reds under every bed. Nevertheless, the decision to snuff out the threat of Castro by hiring Tom Jefferson, America's best assassin, to kill him comes from an unusual quarter: the Mafia.

In 1965, five teenage friends fled Glasgow for London to pursue their dream of musical stardom. Yet before year's end three returned, and returned damaged. In 2015, a brutal murder forces those three men, now in their 60s, to journey back to London and finally confront the dark truth they have run from for five decades. Runaway is a crime novel covering 50 years of friendships solidified and severed, dreams shared and shattered and passions lit and extinguished.

Bernt Lund harbours a sickness. He is a monster: in the mind of society, in the mind of his nine-year-old victims' parents, and in the mind of his fellow inmates. Lennart Oscarsson has a situation. The worst scenario imaginable for the head of Aspsås prison's department for sexual crimes. These two men's actions are about to hand DCI Ewert Grens the most profoundly sickening and impossibly sensitive case of his career, and in Stockholm's history.

Bruno, now Chief of Police for the whole Vézère valley, has an unusual challenge to rise to: teaching at his friend Pamela's new cookery school. It is a daunting prospect - the disappearance of one of the school's pupils almost serves as a welcome distraction. When the woman's body is discovered in one half of a double homicide, the evidence points to something far out of the ordinary. The other murder victim is a man, covered in combat scars and with a false passport. Investigations reveal a list of enemies as long as Bruno's arm.

The event of the Périgord tourist season is to be the re-enactment of the liberation of the historic town of Sarlat from the English in 1370. But it all goes wrong when the man playing the part of the French general is almost killed in the heat of the action. The immediate question for chief of police Bruno Courrèges is was this an accident - or deliberate? The stakes rise when Bruno learns that the man, Kerquelin, was running Frenchelon, the secret French electronic intelligence base nearby, after being recruited from a brilliant Silicon Valley career.

It is summer in St Denis and Bruno is busy organising the annual village concert. He's hired a local Périgord folk group, Les Troubadours, to perform their latest hit 'A Song for Catalonia'. But when the song unexpectedly goes viral, the Spanish government, clamping down on the Catalonian bid for independence, bans Les Troubadours from performing it. The timing couldn't be worse, and Bruno finds himself under yet more pressure when a specialist sniper's bullet is found in a wrecked car near Bergerac.

The inspector frowned and examined the earth under the trees. As he scanned the glade, his stomach lurched. One, two, three, four. Five, counting the mound of earth disturbed under the tent. Somebody had cleared the earth of its natural layer and sown their own flowers. In five places. Five graves. A young woman, Fiona Holland, has gone missing from a small Irish village. A search is mounted, but there are whispers. Fiona had a wild reputation. Was she abducted, or has she run away?

St Denis may be picturesque and sleepy, but it has more than its fair share of murder and mystery, as Bruno knows all too well. When Bruno is invited to the 90th birthday of a powerful local patriarch - a war hero with high-level political connections in France, Russia and Israel - he encounters a family with more secrets than even he had imagined.